But here's an interaction with the famous author that's actually
pretty interesting and edifying.

Musician Brian
Eno, a member of the glam rock band Roxy Music, has written
an open letter to Nassim Taleb that raises some interesting
questions about concepts like safety, fragility, and robustness,
which are all popular Taleb topics.

Eno's thoughts key off the 2011 nuclear tragedy at Fukushima.

As he frames it, there's been an incredible geographical
expansion of human caring. People in the U.S. now worry, for
example, about the fate of people in Tsunami-ravaged Japan. And
yet at the same time as we've gotten more big picture in our
geographical thinking, we've gotten more short-term in our
thinking (Eno advocates nuclear power, and thinks it will be a
big long-term environmental mistake to stop investing in
nuclear).

He writes:

Indeed our geographical 'circle of empathy' grows decade on
decade: a hundred years ago it would have been impossible to
imagine millions of people raising hundreds of millions of pounds
for tsunami victims on the other side of the world - people they
didn't know and would almost certainly never meet. In terms of
geography, we inhabit a much bigger picture than we used to, and
we sense our interconnectedness within it.

In terms of time, however, the picture seems to be narrowing.
Public attention is increasingly focused on very near futures:
businesses live in terror of the bottom line and the quarterly
results, while politicians quake at tomorrow's opinion polls and
formulate policy in terms of them. We've heard tales of farmers
planting olive trees or vineyards for their grandchildren to
harvest, or of foresters cultivating groves of oaks to replace a
chapel roof hundreds of years in the future, but by and large, we
don't do that anymore. We have less active engagement with our
future than our ancestors did.

...

To illustrate this, think about nuclear power. Start with
FUKUSHIMA, that dread word. As a result of over-excited media
reporting ('great story!' I heard one journalist say) that single
word has probably condemned nuclear power for another generation,
when in fact the accident produced no radiation-related deaths
(and it's doubtful that it will produce a discernable statistical
blip in cancers in the future). In a conspiracy which seems
almost dishonest, most Green groups failed to acknowledge this -
it was too good as propaganda for them to let the facts get in
the way - and of course the press never returned to the subject
with any correctional follow-up. It became one of those little
nuggets of received, and totally incorrect, wisdom:
Nuclear=Fukushima=Catastrophe.

That received non-wisdom has persuaded Green Germany to begin
decommissioning its nuclear reactors - which means more
coal-fired plants. Japan too will probably turn back to coal.
Coal is - even Greenpeace would agree - the worst option, though
they'd claim that the gap can be filled by renewables. It can't,
not now and probably not for decades. In the meantime - and it
may be a long, mean time - we'll use coal. It's cheap and very,
very dirty.

So the real catastrophe of Fukushima is in the future, waiting
for us in the form of vastly increased atmospheric CO2.

Eno then concludes:

The nuclear issue - which I've used as an example in this letter
- is only one of many I could have chosen. The fact is, we're
facing a lot of complex and interrelated problems which demand
that we take positions now. To some extent, that position is
going to have to be 'let's improvise' because there's a distinct
limit to how well we can make predictions. The de facto nuclear
storage arrangements currently in use in America are examples of
'let's improvise' and in this case seem to be a not-too-bad
arrangement. But 'let's improvise' has its limitations: in fact
it's sort of what got us where we are now, in a place that's both
wondrous and problematic. We might need some other intellectual
weapons in our arsenals, no matter how good we become at jamming.